Five

Leo Kavanagh, the publisher from Dingle whom Anna had immediately summed up as dull and boring when she had met him at the Seamus Heaney event, spent the day after the book launch engaged in the dull and boring activities that largely constituted his life.

His morning was spent at a meeting with the Arts Council and his afternoon at a lengthy meeting of one of the Irish language organisations that grant-aided his publications. For his evening entertainment he had convened a meeting – likely to be the longest of the lot – of the organisation he himself had founded about a year ago, The Enemies of the Killing Roads, or, as he had observed to Anna the night before, Killing Roads, as it was usually referred to by those who were aware of its existence. Not many.

The prospect of that particular meeting hung over Leo all day, casting a dark shadow on the others. Dull as they were, they would, he knew, be far superseded in dullness by the meeting in the evening. And the vision of an alternative meeting taunted him. A meeting with Kate Murphy. That the same word could be applied to that encounter and the event he was about to endure was curious. Dinner with Kate Murphy, in a candle-lit restaurant, the mellow light dappling her childish face, the atmosphere warm with the promise of love … He could see it, in his mind’s eye, perfectly vividly, as if it were a reality. And at the same time he knew it was far from real. He was both enchanted and tortured by it. If only his dream could come true … it could so easily, so easily, it seemed to him. It depended only on her, on Kate saying yes.

How did she actually feel about him? That was the question. She was difficult to read. She had been very friendly last night. And on the other hand, he suspected she liked that other fellow, that Swedish fellow who looked like a mean and hungry wolf. Still she had given him, Leo, her card without hesitation, which looked promising. And then she had said she wasn’t free to meet him today or tonight, which didn’t. He could be sensible. He could just take her excuse at face value, interpret it literally. She was genuinely busy; there was no personal slight intended. But there were other ways to read her ambivalence. If she liked him as much as he liked her, wouldn’t she have changed her plans, made an effort to meet him if only for a cup of coffee? Would that have been so difficult to fit in? How busy could an administrator at Poetry Plus actually be?

These thoughts were not uplifting. On the whole, he inclined towards the more negative reading.

He had a miserable day.

And then there was Killing Roads.

Killing Roads: a group, an organisation, a committee – it was hard to know what it was – had been established to solve a problem, but, like a lot of such organisations, it had quickly become a problem itself. There were several difficulties with this group, apart from its name – try as he might Leo had been unable to find a better one, and the members of the group were either so unimaginative or so lazy that they had not even tried at all. That was another problem: the general laziness, apathy and lack of imagination of all the members. And the third was that there were hardly any members anyway. Although he had tried to make this group large, busy and important on a national scale, his efforts to do so had been completely in vain. Hardly anyone joined. Hardly anyone even knew of its existence. Hardly anyone, it seemed to Leo, cared that the death toll on Irish roads was the highest in the Western world. In Kerry – where the road carnage was very bad – there was absolutely no interest in it, and so its extremely intermittent meetings were now confined to Dublin. Leo usually managed to set one up when he had to be in the capital for business reasons as well, killing a few birds with one stone.

Tonight’s meeting was to take place in the house of John Perry, the most committed member of the committee – indeed, apart from Leo, its only committed member. The meetings were usually held in members’ houses to save money. A room in a hotel or a pub would have been preferable but nowadays even the most appalling room cost a hundred euro and the coffers of Killing Roads were completely empty. Members were supposed to pay an annual fee but they never did. Leo had considered expelling those who did not pay up but the difficulty with that strategy was that if he applied it, there would be no members at all – with the exception of John Perry. He was the only one who had ever paid the fifty euro required by the statutes.

John Perry lived in Rathcormac, miles away from where any of the other members lived. That was not the only reason for Leo’s expectation that the attendance tonight would be small, but it was one of them. He was only coming from the city centre but it took him almost two hours to get to John’s house – for some unaccountable reason, for much of its journey through the outskirts of Dublin the Luas, Red Line, stopped at various places in the middle of nowhere; it seemed to have been designed to cause maximum inconvenience to commuters. Instead of going into the village of Rathcormac, for instance, the nearest stop to that vast conglomeration of houses was situated out on the motorway on the side the Red Cow roundabout, about a mile and a half from the closest habitation. A bus was supposed to be available from there, but Leo knew from bitter experience that it was extremely unreliable, so he walked the rest of the way, along the motorway, then along a bleak slip road past some factories before finally hitting places where people actually lived, after about half an hour.

Rathcormac village, when he finally reached it, came as a pleasant surprise, as it always did on these treks out to John’s house – the frustration of public transport tended to make him forget that he was heading for what had been an ecclesiastical settlement in the Middle Ages. Once, the suburbs of Dublin had been a land of saints and scholars and Rathcormac had been as saintly and scholarly as the best of them. Even still it possessed a round tower and a general aura of ancientness, which had been superseded in his, and the media and public imagination, by its reputation for bad housing estates. The beautiful melodious name was often heard on the news in connection with drug seizures and drug-related shootings, accompanied by images of small white houses with unkempt lawns surrounded by white plastic police cordons, or, if there had been a murder, a white marquee in which the chief state coroner would carry out a post-mortem examination of the latest victim of gangland crime.

In reality, though, Rathcormac was a pretty village; it had some nice clothes shops, and a pub. Even the houses in the much maligned estate had flowering shrubs and dahlias in their gardens, and looked much like suburban houses anywhere else. None that Leo passed was surrounded by policemen, or marred by shattered windows, or any other evidence of recent murderous exchanges. The only people he saw were three quite ordinary-looking boys playing football on a green, and a few dauntless, but well-dressed, small children extracting the last minutes of playtime from the dying autumn day. None of these people offered him heroin, or any kind of drug, or tried to shoot him.

John’s house looked like a neglected version of any of the other houses. Every estate has one or two of these. The grass in his patch of lawn was cut in that haphazard way that suggests its owner resented nature’s insistence that grass grow even in his garden, where anyone could see that it was not welcome. He hadn’t bothered to pull up the weeds around the edges; there was not a single dahlia or even a common shrub in sight, but dandelion clocks, and thistles, very tall and very spiky, and the anonymous weeds that thrive in neglected gardens, abounded. The curtains on his windows had that limp, yellowed sadness of curtains that had never been washed since the day they were hung up; in this case a day that had apparently occurred about thirty years ago.

Inside was even worse. The smell of neglect accosted you as soon as you entered the dim hall. It wasn’t exactly a smell of dirt but more an absence of anything pleasant – no chicken had been roasted in this house in a long, long time, or apple pies baked. There had never been a vase of fragrant roses in the little dark hall, or even a chemical air-freshener.

In other words, it was a bachelor’s house of the old-fashioned variety.

Bachelors’ houses of the old-fashioned variety terrified Leo. They reminded him that he lived in a bachelor’s house himself. The indisputable fact of his bachelordom was one which he didn’t like to reflect upon very often – he was too busy working through his days to sit back and consider the larger issues affecting his own existence, although he spent a great deal of time worrying about the larger issues affecting everyone else’s. When this aspect of his own life was suddenly brought to his attention, it shocked him, and filled him with dread. Could it be that this state in which he found himself, what he thought of as a purely temporary state, was in fact going to be permanent? Like most people, he believed his conditions were transitory, that he was merely on a journey to his real life, the life he desired. But when he saw John’s garden and smelt John’s hall, the dreadful realisation that perhaps the life he was living was the only life he was going to get dawned on him.

However, it was perfectly clear to anybody entering that hall that nobody could possibly have chosen the life it represented and accepted it as defining and permanent. John obviously thought that he was still in rehearsal. He hadn’t even got as far as the dress rehearsal. He was still in the rented room in a disused warehouse, going over his lines, assuming that his real life would start on opening night.

And John was fifty years old.

All these uncomfortable insights flashed through Leo’s mind in the seconds it took for John to usher him from the dark hall into the sitting room, a room in which the air seemed to be foggy, as if a depressing weather front had somehow managed to get in through the window and establish itself, permanently, inside.

John left to make a cup of tea. Leo sat down on a huge armchair covered with a fabric that had the colour and texture of rat’s fur. Now he understood why he had been filled with foreboding all day. His latent memory of the effect John Perry’s house had on his mood had been trying to assert itself, trying to prevent him for going back to the danger. Thinking about the strange way his mind worked helped to dispel his fear. He sat in the rat-coloured room and watched his gloom float away through the dusty window and out, out into the darkening night.

‘Don’t think we’ll have many tonight,’ Leo managed cheerily enough, when John came back carrying one green mug of tea in his hand, with the tea bag bobbing around its surface like a shark’s fin in a little mud pond.

John looked peeved. ‘Well, it’s not quite eight o’clock,’ he said anxiously.

This was one of the problems with meetings in people’s houses. The hosts took it as a personal slight when people didn’t turn up.

‘Look, I’ve started this scrapbook.’ Leo tried to distract him. With a scrapbook. He pulled it from his backpack.

It was a child’s scrapbook, made of coloured card. Leo opened it. A small clipping was glued in on the first page, which was a bright pink.

FIVE DIE IN KERRY COLLISION

Mary Lynch

Five people died after a two-car collision early yesterday in Co. Kerry. A sixth person is in intensive care in Tralee General Hospital following the accident, which took place at a blackspot on the road between Castleisland and Killarney at around 2.30 a.m.

This is the fourth multiple-death crash in this area in the past two years.

All six people in yesterday’s crash are believed to be eastern Europeans living in the area.

Leo opened the next page, which was a dark, gloomy purple.

MORE THAN ONE A DAY ARE NOW DYING

Angela Moriarty

One person has died on Irish roads every twenty hours since the beginning of 2005.

The article, a full spread, carried statistics and photographs, images of wrecked cars, pictures of people who had been killed, and a large photograph of a young woman and her three-year-old daughter.

Siobhán Murphy, of Castleknock, pictured here with her daughter Jane, was killed with her friend Ciara O’Connell when the car in which they were travelling was involved in a three-car collision on the M50 near the Red Cow roundabout last Friday.

John leafed through the thick pages, while Leo sipped his tea. Both activities were undertaken with similar degrees of trepidation. ‘Pedestrian killed by a lorry in Ballinasloe’; ‘Cyclist dies after accident involving a truck on Eden Quay’. There were photographs of lorries, broken-up cars, smiling faces (the victims before the accident) and weeping faces (their relations, after the accident).

Leo had begun keeping this scrapbook, his Killing Roads Collection, three months ago. Already one bumper-size book was full of brief reports of deaths on the road – he had tried to restrict himself to factual accounts, which on the whole was all that was available, although occasionally, after some particularly horrendous spate of carnage, the Sunday newspapers commissioned opinion pieces and articles based on what usually seemed to be about an hour’s research by some heavyweight journalist. The statistics were in his scrapbook, Leo believed. The statistics, the story, the tragedy, the farce, all glued in on purple, pink, yellow and orange stiff paper, between two covers depicting a multicoloured roller coaster in which laughing children tumbled around against an azure sky.

He waited for a response from John. His hope – one of his many strange hopes – was that all the members of Killing Roads would start to keep scrapbooks. There would be overlap in contents of course, but probably not too much. He was always missing things, forgetting to glue in articles or too lazy to do so. And they would buy different newspapers, so the angle on the deaths would vary slightly. If they accumulated ten scrapbooks – there were ten members – and sent them to the Minister, or organised an exhibition somewhere, a library say, they would be sensational. So he believed. Graphics, touch-screens with statistics – the whole thing could be sensational. It would attract attention. It would shock, when people saw all the deaths gathered together in this way. Spread over the newspapers, drip fed, three a week, five a week, the news of carnage had lost its power to impress. The reports came as regularly and as predictably as the news from the stock exchange, or the weather forecast. Every week, six more deaths. Boring, predictable, and accumulating. Four thousand between 1996 and 2005. A statistic Leo often thought of, often quoted.

John looked up. ‘Yeah,’ he said, in his tired voice, apparently suppressing a yawn. He often sounded like that. At other times he became angry and irritated. ‘But what’s the point of this? Where will it lead?’

Leo concealed his impatience. John was one of those people who see the snags in everything. Indeed some members of Killing Roads had suggested, once when he was not at a meeting, that they ask him to resign. They felt he was a destructive force. But how could they throw him out when he had only missed one meeting in his life – when he had been sick, with Malta fever, whatever that was. It was typical of John Perry to have an illness nobody had ever heard of.

‘I thought we could decide that at the end of the year,’ Leo said. ‘We could have an exhibition.’

‘An exhibition?’ John was genuinely flabbergasted.

‘Yes. If we all keep a scrapbook with any regularity at all, we’ll have dozens by the end of the year. I think they’d make a powerful impact displayed in some public place.’

‘Like where?’ said John in his querulous, annoying voice.

‘I don’t know yet. The National Library maybe. They have a lot of exhibitions.’

‘The National Library? They’d never do an exhibition of scrapbooks about car crashes. They do exhibitions on dead writers … who died in their beds, rich and famous, for the most part.’

‘Well, some other library, or somewhere else … that’s a mere detail.’

‘Not really,’ said John. He began to tell Leo what was wrong with his idea.

He went on doing this for about an hour.

At that stage, since nobody else had come, Leo decided it was appropriate to call off the meeting. ‘We don’t have a quorum,’ he said, although he did not know what they would want a quorum for, or even what a quorum was. But it must be more than him and John Perry.

The following morning Leo took the 10.45 train from Heuston Station to Tralee. He used public transport for a variety of reasons, the most pressing of which was that he could not drive. But he also used the train as a protest against the supremacy of the killing car in Ireland, and as a matter of environmental principle, and to give a good example to his neighbours in Kerry, almost all of whom drove suvs. Upholding these principles did not mean that he found the train trip enjoyable. On the contrary, it irritated the life out of him.

Often on this journey he had to do special exercises, transcendental meditation, discreet yoga manoeuvres, to keep comparisons with train journeys enjoyed in other European countries at bay. He had told himself time and time again that he should stop comparing Irish things to things on the Continent. But as he settled into a seat by a window that had not been cleaned in months, irritating memories of train journeys he had undertaken in other countries kept popping into his head. The tgv from Paris to Bordeaux: two and a half hours. Seville to Madrid: two and a half hours. Stockholm to Gothenburg: three hours. Dublin to Tralee: four hours and forty minutes.

Comparisons are odious. At least there still was a train to Tralee. It was not like going to Donegal, where the tracks had been closed down by de Valera long ago, to prevent people from going through the Six Counties and seeing what they were like, probably. Or to prevent people in Donegal from ever going anywhere.

This morning he experienced no anger management issues, even though the dining car was closed and the trolley service had been cancelled for some unexplained reason – apologies for any inconvenience caused were proffered on the fuzzy intercom, implying that such inconvenience was merely a distant possibility and that most people would have sensibly brought their own sandwiches with them. Leo hadn’t. But he did not care. He sat in his plastic seat, ignoring the loud conversation of a couple of travellers who were a few seats away, and stared through the dusty window at the flat fields, not reading, not sleeping, not bored at the monotony of the vista – green grass for two hundred miles, occasionally relieved by a small, exquisite, cut-stone station where a few old age pensioners waited patiently on the platform with their trolleys, for who knew what?

The train to Ballybrophy, maybe, or the death coach, whichever came first.

Leo was thinking about Kate.

Whatever her feelings about that wolfish Norwegian, or whatever he claimed to be, she had talked to him for at least half an hour at the book launch, and afterwards had agreed to visit him in Kerry, handing over her mobile number without the slightest reservation, even though she had been unable to go on with him to the pub or meet him the following day.

He had come across her on a few previous occasions, at literary events, and had always liked her. She was bright but not in the least bit brash. Her eyes sparkled with insight and sympathy. She appeared to understand perfectly why he had chosen to live in the country, to get away from the rat race of Dublin, and, although he knew she had a successful career in public relations, he was quite sure that she would love to escape from urban life if she possibly could.

When he had first met her, he had not considered her especially beautiful, but last night she had impressed him as being the most attractive woman by far in that large gathering. He tried to bring up her image to his mind. It was difficult. He couldn’t remember what colour eyes she had – but they were very big, he remembered that, he could see them, laughing happily at something he had said. Her hair … it was not blond, some dark colour, brown, and she wore it in an unusual way. But what way? France was what she reminded him of, when it came to the crunch; slim, feminine, French women climbing stairs in Les Halles. She was as chic as that, very slim and dressed in some simple, tasteful style.

He was sure that she liked him. Her big eyes had met his on about four occasions, and hers, he believed, were full of empathy. That was what he had read in them, at the time, and when he was feeling happy, that was the reading he remembered. He would call her in a week and arrange for a meeting. If she did not want to come to Kerry, he would find an excuse to go to Dublin himself. He should go there soon again in any case, to hold another, proper, meeting of Killing Roads, where they could discuss their falling membership and the question of their future. Thus, his future with Kate and his future with Killing Roads could be dealt with in one fateful visit.

At Portlaoise his reveries, which were just becoming enjoyable, were disrupted and he was dragged from his daydreams. A woman sat opposite him, not the type he wanted to talk to. He pulled out a book, anxious to avoid conversation, hoping to find a way back into his head while pretending to read. On a commuter train such a problem would never have arisen. But on these intercity trains the rules were different. Many passengers believed it was quite normal to engage strangers in conversation, as if they had bought a right to entertainment with their return ticket. This woman was one of those passengers.

‘An bhféadfainn breathnú i do nuachtán?’ she asked. His copy of the Irish Times was on the table.

His eyes widened in surprise. ‘Fáilte romhat,’ he replied.

She took the paper.

How did she know he was an Irish speaker too? Was there something in his appearance that revealed it to everyone? He stroked his eyebrows nervously. If some physical trait, or something else – his clothes, perhaps? – indicated that he was an Irish speaker, it would not be anything very attractive, he was sure. Nobody wants to be told they look Irish, still less that they look like an Irish speaker. Much better to look like a French speaker, or a Swedish speaker, or a Polish speaker. Or a Scots-Gaelic speaker. Or even Welsh … though that would be down the list. What does the stereotypical Irish speaker look like? A burly potato head wearing a scratchy sweater, that’s what. And I’m not wearing a scratchy sweater, thought Leo.

He had forgotten that one of the poetry books he published was on the table.

The woman read a few lines on the front page of the newspaper. Or seemed to. He glanced at her over the rim of his book, gradually taking in her unusual, her weird, appearance. Her hair was long, black and dry, like burnt straw. She had exceptionally pink cheeks and a wide red mouth. She did not look like an Irish speaker. Or an English speaker. He could not put his finger on it, but something about her looked extraordinary, as if she had possibly come, not just from another country, but from another planet.

And at the same time she looked familiar, as if he had met her before somewhere, at a book launch or a party … it must have been the latter; she did not look like a book launch type.

‘I can’t read,’ she said simply, as if she had read his thoughts. She looked up at him with a wide smile.

He put down his book, taken aback. He did not ask her why she had asked for a newspaper, if she couldn’t read. He knew why. She had asked for it in the first place to test her theory that he spoke Irish and, secondly, to trap him. She had asked for it expressly to provide a dramatic context for her sensational confession. He sighed. He was in for a tête-à-tête.

Wondering where she was bound, and hoping it was not the terminus, he prepared to hear her story. Like the newspaper request, this was not unusual. The train to Tralee was always full of people who were dying to tell him their most intimate secrets at the drop of a hat. He had long ago stopped wondering if this had something to do with him: did he look kind and understanding, the sort of person a stranger would instinctively trust? He knew now that the transaction was all one-sided, and these people would have talked to anybody at all, anybody equipped with two ears and trapped in the seat at the other side of the hard grey table.

‘Oh?’ He tried to be as discouraging as possible, although as a poet, publisher and socialist he should have been interested.

‘I never learned. I used to miss school a lot when I was young and there were about sixty in the class anyways.’

‘But you learned Irish?’

She smiled. ‘I never had to learn it,’ she said. ‘It’s what we spoke at home.’

He nodded. ‘And you tried to learn to read since you left school?’ he asked.

‘Oh yeah, loads of times. I went to some of those classes, literacy classes. I had a tutor all to myself. And the funny thing is, sometimes I can read.’ She pointed at the poetry book. ‘I can read this,’ she said. ‘That’s why I borrowed your paper. I thought I could read it too. But I can’t.’ She frowned.

‘Hm,’ said Leo, unable to think of anything to say.

‘Sometimes when I had a lesson, I’d just open the book and read away for myself. And for that again, the next time, I could hardly make out a word.’

‘Curious,’ he said. She needed a psychologist, probably, but he didn’t say that. It might sound tactless. Also, he couldn’t recall the Irish for psychologist.

‘I need a psychologist really,’ she said. A siceolaí. ‘That’s what my husband says,’ she added. ‘My husband that was.’

And so it all came out. Between Portlaoise and Mallow he learned that she was separated, that her husband was taking her to court and attempting to prove that she was an incompetent mother, suing for access to their two children, that he gave her no financial support, that she had been beaten as a child by her teacher (that was why she couldn’t read), that she had worked in a factory but when she had been promoted to the job of manager, she had had to resign, because her secret would have been revealed.

This sad, almost tragic, tale she told with utmost cheerfulness, laughing as she disclosed the dreary details, her rosy cheeks glowing. Her deeply depressing life had not depressed her in the slightest, it seemed. She was as happy as if all she had known since birth had been a bed of roses.

At Mallow station she got up. Was she leaving the train or just going to the loo? He waited with bated breath.

‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘I have to get out here.’

Leo sighed happily and took a good look at her. Now he could see that she was wearing a very short pink coat, and black lacy stockings with pink, high-heeled shoes. Everything about her looked dotty. On the one hand, she reminded him of a character from a television series he had liked as a child, all about scarecrows. On the other, he wondered if she were some sort of low-grade prostitute – not that he supposed it likely that there would be any other kind in Mallow. But you never knew, of course, these days, with the new affluence.

‘Goodbye, nice to meet you too,’ he said. She kissed him. And then he did a stupid thing: he gave her his card, saying, ‘Here, phone me if you, you know, need help.’ With what? The reading, or the violent husband, or the mental problems? And how could he help anyway, with anything?

This was the sort of thing he was always doing. He was a sucker for hard-luck stories. As soon as he said goodbye to her and saw her climbing onto the platform, wobbling in her high heels, he regretted his impulse. The next thing, she’d be burgling his house, or her crazy husband, if there was a husband, would be turning up on his doorstep with a sawn-off shotgun in his grubby little fist.

Hours later, Leo was on that doorstep himself, fiddling with the long key in the lock that was always troublesome. Sometimes he believed rain made it temperamental, but it hadn’t rained much at all this year, most remarkably, and still there was always a question mark hanging over entry to the house. Would he get in or not? He did on this occasion, as on all others, but still that moment of uncertainty arose every time.

Leo’s life was difficult, largely owing to his general insistence on placing ideals over practicalities and refusing to compromise. His environmentalism, his devotion to Irish, his career as a publisher of poetry, made life difficult for him. But there was one lucky thing in Leo’s life: his house.

He had bought it from an American, a lawyer from Manhattan whom he had never met in person. Dean Swift. Mr Swift’s father had had the house built in the late 1960s and had holidayed there on and off until he died, leaving it to his son, who had no interest in the house or the area. It had not been expensive. Houses in this district were reputed to be wildly overpriced, but as far as Leo could see, this was a myth. Nobody wanted to buy a second-hand house anyway; both the natives, young people settling down in the area, and the outsiders who ‘fell in love’ with the place and decided to get a holiday house in it, preferred to build their own. Sites were sold all the time and new houses mushroomed, but old ones, especially houses like this one, which were not really old, were not in demand. Leo had been able to buy it for a fraction of what he had got for his semi-d. in Dundrum.

It was a beautiful house. Nestling in a niche that had been dug out of the side of a hill overlooking the Atlantic, its south wall was constructed almost entirely of glass, so that even when he was indoors, he felt he was in the green field outside. The living room had a red stone floor and an oak ceiling. Everyone who came to visit exclaimed in delight, and surprise, since nobody expected Leo to live in any style at all. They expected him to live in the sort of place John Perry lived in. Leo expected that himself. Every time he walked into his own living room he was filled with astonishment. He might be a nerdy, Irish-speaking poetry publisher with a scratchy sweater and a potato head but this good house was his home.

Kate would have to come and see it. Once she did, she would be truly impressed. She would be as surprised as anyone else, and this surprise would rapidly transform into lifelong love for the owner of the beautiful house, for Leo.

The next few days passed quickly. He had a deadline with the printer for the end of the week, and as usual at such times, he was occupied almost full-time in making sure everything was ready – it always took longer than he anticipated. He managed to get down to the pub twice, to hear the local gossip – three sheep had been savaged by an Alsatian dog, owned by the Italian woman who had moved in last year, was the main news. Five people told him the story, each with its own variations – two sheep, six sheep, two ewes, a ram. Some people said the woman came from Spain and one said she was a Romanian gypsy. The dog had not been put down, they were all agreed on that, although there was a division of views as to whether this was a good thing or a bad thing.

A night’s entertainment was derived from this one story, twisted and turned and viewed from many angles: a story goes a long way in the country. That was one of the things Leo loved about it. This endless, original, witty conversation about nothing at all. Talk for its own sake, talk as rich as Restoration comedy, talk as a secret art form that the world did not know about. So much better than endless, jargon-filled meetings and launches and rushing for the bus.

For a while he was thoroughly happy, just to be back in the country, back in the local pub, back to his own routines. He liked getting up when he felt like it and coming down to the big kitchen in his thick red dressing gown. Looking out to the field, with its ragged grass and clutches of rusting rushes, to see what he could see. A hare, sometimes a pheasant, which had come to nest in a ditch full of fuchsia at the next house. Occasionally, if he was up early, a red fox. Then coffee and Raidió na Gaeltachta before moving to his desk and doing a bit of work. Here, his house blended in with the field, and the field melted into the sea and most of the time you could hardly tell the sea from the sky. His work blended with his leisure. He could edit in bed, or while he waited for the potatoes to boil. There were no sharp divisions, the kind of divisions the city demanded of everyone, artificial barriers that had no place in the life of good faith, which was Leo’s aspiration.

But time wore on and the bliss of rural life wore off. He began to feel lonely, more lonely than usual.

Kate did not telephone. She did not telephone on Monday and she did not telephone on Tuesday. His anxiety grew. Wednesday came and she did not telephone on Wednesday. On Thursday he decided he could not recall whether she had said she would phone him, or whether he was supposed to phone her. Of course he remembered perfectly well.

She said she’d ring him. So why hadn’t she? Why didn’t she?

There was probably some perfectly natural reason. For instance, that she was sick, or had been suddenly called abroad on some urgent Poetry Plus business. (Such as what? Advising the Taoiseach on poetry policy during an important trade mission to Iran or Afghanistan or some such place, where the Vodafone network hadn’t penetrated?) He should ring and ask. She was probably wondering why he didn’t phone and deducing that he was a cad who didn’t care about her.

But on the other hand, perhaps she had simply decided that she didn’t care about him and never wanted to see him or even talk to him on the phone again. He was reluctant to let on how much he cared. He did not want to harass her.

He set a deadline for himself. After this deadline he would allow himself to bury his pride and his scruples. He would telephone. He would harass. The alternative was to go mad. This deadline he set, after much deliberation, as lunchtime on Friday – since this was obviously the last possible time at which she could decide to come down for the weekend.

At one fifteen on Friday, a quarter of an hour after the deadline – he had made himself wait, and had sat with the phone in his hand for fifteen minutes, in agony – he dialled her number.

She answered immediately. That was reassuring. But she seemed surprised, which was not.

‘How are you?’ he asked, trying to keep the terror out of his voice.

‘Very well, thank you,’ she said, ‘and you?’

Very well. It was too formal. Fine, grand, the best, not bad. Terrible. Any of those would have been better than ‘very well’. His heart sank. But he pulled it back up again. She hadn’t actually hung up.

‘Oh the best.’ Be cheerful, encourage her into a similar mood. ‘Busy, of course.’ He looked out at the field, at the clumps of rushes struggling in the wind, like mankind pitted against the awful giants of fate. The angry charcoal mist was rolling in over the sea and the seagulls were wheeling inland, screeching their heads off, seeking shelter from the coming storm.

‘Yes, yes,’ she said, trying to think of something to say. And it was clear that this something was not going to be ‘I’ll be down there with you tonight. I’m just leaving to catch the train this minute’.

There was silence on the line for a long, sad half a minute. Leo broke it.

‘Well, I wondered … we spoke about the possibility of your coming down for a weekend? I wondered if you would like to come this weekend?’

There was an even more dreadful silence, this time very short, and, somehow, bristling with lively emotion.

Which turned out to be amusement. Some scorn and disbelief – and a lot of amusement.

‘This weekend?’ she laughed heartily. ‘Ohmygod, no, no! Not this weekend. I’m really sorry! There’s no way I could … did I really create that impression?’

That impression. Really. Create.

The telephone call went on for another minute or two, during which Leo’s feelings slid downhill from the slope of embarrassment to the pit of despair.

When he put down the phone, he banged his head against the table six times, something he had not done since he was fifteen. He felt even younger, and smaller, and crazier. But when his head began to hurt, he stopped banging and stared out the window at the Great Blasket, its moss green slopes rising with serene defiance from the dark foggy sea, just as it had done for millions of years before the telephone call and as it would do for many years to come. And what difference did that make? One way or the bloody other? To him at this moment? If they pollute the planet to pieces, so be it. What do I care? I’d be just as glad to go down with it, Killing Roads, Blasket Islands, Celtic Tigers, the whole fucking lot. One big bang and start again, or not start again, or anything.

He went to bed and slept for fifteen hours.

When he woke up, he felt much better.

He was a morning person. At around four, before dawn broke, he emailed everyone on the Killing Roads committee and suggested that they meet in Dublin soon, to discuss the future of the society.

After sending the emails, he felt much better. His connection with Dublin had been re-established. Soon enough he would be back there.

He went back to bed and snoozed until the sun rose over Mount Eagle.